5 Marketing Lessons from The Great British Bake Off

Is there anything more British than sitting down after tea to watch a group of people get together for a spot of competitive baking in a tent while it pours with rain outside? That’s right, it’s that time of year again – Bake Off is back.

Some 5.8 million people tuned in to watch Channel 4’s Bake Off debut a week and a half ago, proving that there’s nothing more this nation loves than a cringe-worthy soggy bottom or a baked alaska fiasco that causes a national outrage. Clearly, they’re doing something right.

So how can you make the nation love your brand just as much as they love GBBO?

Here are 5 marketing lessons from the The Great British Bake Off…

Mix it up

The key is in the mix! A bad cake mix, the wrong measurements, or just not enough mixing is seriously gonna diminish your chances of creating a mouthwatering masterpiece. In the same way, your marketing mix has to be just right for what you’re trying to achieve. Whether it’s integrating print and digital, or adding a sprinkle of social media to your PR, having agood marketing mix and the right balance of ingredients is a key element of of your marketing strategy.

Don’t be half-baked

Is there anything worse than watching the terror on the face of a Bake Off contestant when Paul Hollywood cuts into their cake only to reveal that it’s underbaked? If there’s one thing to take from this, it’s never present anything half-baked. Marketing is an investment in your business and its growth, which means that it’s worth the time, effort, and money spent getting it right. It can really show when brands cut corners when it comes to their marketing and design, and besides, your audience will appreciate the extra effort – much like they would if you baked them something from scratch.

Test, test, and test again

Ever notice that they always ask the contestants whether they’ve tested their bake at home during the competition? It’s hard to get something right first time – especially if you’re trying to pull off a real showstopper. Marketing without testing, measuring,and refining isn’t really marketing – it’s just doing stuff. Whether it’s A/B testing your emails, testing the best times to post on social media, or testing your website performance, measuring, reviewing, or refining is the only way to ensure that your marketing activity is really working.

Listen to your audience

When Channel 4 bought The Great British Bake Off for £75 million, the nation was fully prepared to mourn the loss of a national treasure, fearing that – as the casting of Noel Fielding might have exacerbated – the show would ditch its twee,quintessentially British cloak off for a more quirky, out-there kind of show. However, upon the screening of the first Channel 4 era episode, critics and fans alike were delighted to report that not much had really changed. Clearly, GBBO understands its audience. When rebranding – or any other marketing activity for that matter – what your audience wants should always be at the heart of everything you do. Why? We welcome brands into our everyday lives. They’re present on our breakfast tables, our social lives, our daily commutes – so a rebrand, for example, had better be well calculated and well justified.

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you won’t get the results

There’s nothing more stressful than the technical bake. Imagine trying to bake something from scratch that you’ve never even heard of, or even seen, let alone baked. Now, not every technical challenge is as difficult as this (12 kouign-amanns, anyone?), but sometimes just having the ingredients and a brief set of instructions is not enough to bring you to star baker glory. When it comes to marketing, you can have all the fancy tools you need, but without clear plans and objectives, you won’t get the results you’re looking for. Make sure that you have a strategy, a clear set of goals, and a plan for testing to keep you from resorting to guess work.

Supporting St. Basil’s

As a team, we decided to make St. Basil’s our Charity of the Year 2017. St. Basil’s HQ is located literally a few steps from our office, and we have witnessed some of the amazing work they do for young people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in the Midlands.